When Celebs Shill: Mark McGrath's Very Bad Idea

By
Liz Kelly

Move over Cosmos. According to my e-mail in-box, the latest celebrity beverage trend involves root beer and JÃ¤germeister. From a press release that just popped into my in-box:

Stars are usually seen sipping cosmos or martinis, but there's a new cocktail that's making the rounds in celebrity circles -- the spiked root beer float! At Mark McGrath's new Newport Beach, Calif. restaurant A, they serve root beer floats that Mark calls a "slice of heaven". Here's the recipe:

Yes, while the rest of us poor shmoes have been busy playing catch up with political cocktail trends, celebs -- boundary pushers one and all -- have again confounded us with a game-changing concoction that will doubtless trickle down to your Local Mall Eatery (TM) by year's end.

Or, more likely, this is merely the first volley in some diabolical scheme hatched by Mark McGrath -- Sugar Ray frontman, "Extra" co-host and restaurateur -- and the marketing genius who thunk up Root Beer Vodka (yes, it exists) to boost their collective bottom lines.

To nip any possibility of coming off as some kind of free ad for this abuse of root beer, I'd like it to be known early on that I am squarely against any kind of root beer-related intoxication and no amount of hectoring from Mark McGrath -- dimples or not -- is going to induce me to choke down his deadly float. Perhaps it is a holdover from a teenage misadventure with a rootbeer/wine cooler concoction, but there's just something about the combination of sassafras, carbonation and alcohol that screams projectile vomiting.

Between you and me, this sounds like the type of thing Andy Dick might order at TGIFridays before dropping trou and hanging from some kind of brass ornament. I'm just sayin'.

Sorry Mark McGrath, but when I want to party like a star I'm sticking with my Cristal and B12 injection.